 TheCube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE. Innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. And we're back. This is Stu Miniman along with Steve Keniston, wikibon.org, and we're with SiliconANGLE TVs live continuous coverage here in Las Vegas, digging into the whole ecosystem and a whole lot of solutions that go beyond storage. Segments we're focusing on right now. We're talking about cloud. And our guests for this segment, I happen to have an end user on. I always love the practitioners to be able to share with their peers. Tom Pytler, who's director of IT from Caliber. Tom, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So, first getting a level set a little bit for us. Tell us a little bit about who Caliber is and what your role there. Sure, Caliber is a management consulting and technology services company. We're employee owned and we do a lot of things around logistics, veterans, programs, energy, a lot of different government services and we're also in the private industry as well. Okay, and where are you located? How many locations? Alexandria, Virginia is our headquarters. We have 750 employees approximately and we have four other locations. Okay, and director of IT, how big is the IT staff there? We have approximately 20 people on the IT staff today. Okay, and are they siloed by storage in different pieces or how do you love them today? I don't believe in doing that. I think that when you have a storage engineer and a VMware engineer and a network engineer and a security engineer that you just have no cross training, there's no way for people to grow, no way for them to learn. And that also, if one person leaves, you have a problem on your hand. You're going to have to replace that storage person real quick and find someone who knows EMC or knows Icelon or whatever. So I really believe in having a wide breadth and letting the systems engineers that take care of all of our servers, all our application stack, the storage environment and then we have a network team that takes care of networking and security. Okay, so one of the challenges that of course is, the cross training and understanding more than one domain is a little difficult, how do you handle that? Yeah, we have a pretty robust training budget, a caliber. We believe in taking care of our people and we make sure that as time goes on that we get them to the right trainings. Right now I have one of my systems engineers with me here at EMC world so that he can learn more about what he works on every day. Awesome, so yeah. Hopefully gets to do some of the hands on labs and everything like that. Exactly. Okay, so yeah, let's get into it. Can you paint a map for us a little bit about what is your infrastructure looks at? Would you consider what you have be, is it a hybrid cloud and what pieces do you have? Sure, so we're kind of unique from the perspective of, we actually have two physically different infrastructures. One's our commercial infrastructure where we run all of our corporate applications, our email, our SharePoint, file shares, all those different things. And then we actually have a NipperNet circuit sponsored by the Army. And we do services directly for the military through that circuit. So with those different things, we do have colo sites and we do do a little bit of hybrid but not in the traditional sense where you go to an Amazon web services or you're working with VCloud, something like that. We're actually working more with some mill cloud providers that most people haven't heard of to provide you know, continuity of operations, disaster recovery services, those type of things. Okay, dealing with the government, obviously you have to worry about things like compliance and security. So you know, how did you get to that environment and you know, just talk to us about kind of that process that how did you get to the services that you offer? So years ago, we actually established the NipperNet circuit through one of our projects, the integrated logistics application. And when we did that, we had to go through a die cap and back then it was called DITSGAP and we had to go through all the security controls that are put out by the military. And then as time goes on, we have regular re-accreditations. And so security is at the forefront. We're actually in the transitional period right now because the military is moving away from die cap to what they're calling RMF and that's a lot more NIST based and a lot more FISMA. So there's going to be a lot more controls involved. But as that has gone on, we've gone from traditional firewalls to next generation firewalls. We have a lot of segmentation. And that's really important to us that we make sure that the data is secure and that we make sure that our soldiers are getting the data they need when they need it. Okay, so you mentioned using VMware in your shop. I understand you're using some vCloud, not the vCloud hybrid service, but vCloud. How long have you been using that? I can tell us a little bit about your experience with it. Sure, we started using VMware ESX back in version 3.5. We've been with it since. And we have used a number of other applications. Thin Client and our thin app, I guess they called it, as well as vCloud, vCops for operations management and CapIQ back before vCops. So we've gone through the whole breadth and really we've gone from, I would say, probably around 10 racks on our commercial side down to four and we're probably 90% virtualized. And then on the military side, I would say we're also 90% virtualized and we've been able to get some economies of scale and drive value into the business by doing that. Okay, so if you look back to some of the early cloud discussions, one of the questions was what's the difference between I've used ESX and I'm virtualized. How do I get to that cloud? It has to be kind of the orchestration and the automation. Sounds like you guys have gone through that process. Did you have kind of milestones you said? Did you have a goal to say I want to be a cloud environment, how did you get to that environment? Yeah, I think that we're still going through it. If anybody says we're 100% cloud, I don't believe it. I think that it's a transformational thing right now, but we have gone through a number of processes and being that we do a lot of stuff with the military, it's a learning curve on both sides. Teaching them what we know about the cloud and making sure that from their perspective that the security aspects are being met and everything. So we've been able to do some things. Years ago with one of our programs, we had a number of distributed locations and we would push the data all over the place. And as time's going on, we're looking at things like B-Plex and other technologies, RecoverPoint and things like that so that we can get the data out there cleaner and not have to necessarily rely on everybody getting the same data in sync and make sure that it's available. What were some of the first steps you guys started to take as you were thinking about going down the road of decision making process, not only what am I going to do for my business, but technically how is this going to help me kind of continue to deliver IT as a service per se? Sure, so infrastructure came first. We wanted to make sure we had a robust network, robust storage environment and robust compute, obviously. And then on top of that, we looked at how are we going to drive value into our customers? Being that technology services is part of Calibre, we are not the service provider. We're not an Amazon web services. We're not out there to go get that type of work. But what we do is we have a very solid capability internally and we want to make sure that we can provide value to our customers. So when we're talking to them about bringing on a new application or a new service, not only can we write it for you, not only can we help you analyze the data, not only can we help you publish that data and visualize it and understand it, we can also host it for you and bring you value through this infrastructure that we've created and that we have corporately paid for and that we can give you small chunks of it. And through doing that, we've actually come in cheaper than Amazon web services and other people because we have an infrastructure that's very, very specific to a need and it provides the results that need. So now it's almost like it is, IT is a service. And so the next thing is, as you've started to watch the business grow from when folks would just call you and you build it, maybe then build an application that they would host it probably years ago, whereas now you have the ability to kind of go full gamut and help them host it. Have you seen the business kind of transform? Have you taken on more business? Has it gotten out of control? Yeah, we're trying. That's actually what we're trying to do right now. We're looking at a forward-facing IT group. We're looking at leveraging what's become a great capability of ours where we have high four or five nines and that, hey, we've stumbled upon something. We're doing this as an internal service and we got a good thing going, so let's build it and let's look at these other technologies and growing for the business. So that's where we want to go. I don't think we want to be a hosting company per se, but we want to say, hey, look, we understand end-to-end application delivery and that we can help you get there. Yeah, so Tom, I'm curious. Doesn't sound like you guys are going out there saying, we want to compete with Amazon. You're focused on your customers and therefore there might be services that it's possible they might go to Amazon, but you're either adding more value or your pricing's better. There's a whole lot of options there. That'd be a fair statement? Yeah, it is. It's because we understand their business need and that we understand where they're trying to go. We have a lot of long-term customers and we have first principles that guide us and among them are things like take care of our people, take care of our customers and leverage technology. And so we really stand on those principles to grow the organization. So one of the big talking points here at EMC has been that migration from kind of traditional applications to the more mobile applications, kind of second platform to third platform you were on. I believe you guys span, you know, that offering for your customers. You were talking about some of the data visualization and some of the new big data pieces. So how do you work with your customers and how do you span those environments where the third platform is one that, you know, Amazon seems to be pretty strong in. So how do you span between those? You know, we're actually getting into the third platform now as you look at it and there's two projects that come to mind. One that really focuses around big data. It's our meter data management system program. With that program, what we actually do is we've put meters out and many army installations and we're collecting in that data. We have tons of sensors. We're visualizing it, we're analyzing it. In the first few months of that program, we had one site that we realized that there was an air conditioning in the heating system fighting each other simultaneously. And that within, you know, we got the service tickets put in and everything else. And we got 60% of their utility costs lowered immediately. So, you know, on that big data front, that's what we're looking at doing is, okay, how can we put sensors out there? How can we figure out what's going on and solve problems that they might not even know that they have? And then from the mobile and the third platform and really growing into that, we've had a long standing project that involves logistics where we take a ton of data from supply data, management data, financial data and we bring all that in to one platform and it's traditionally been a online only type platform and we're moving it to a mobile application and so that we can bring people into, get the soldiers in the field the data. So they don't have to go back to base and whatever else they've got, the iPhone and the Android, they can securely access that data. All right, so Tom, they're trying to give us a hook, but I got to give you one last question here. So you've been working on this for a while. So from the virtualization through to the cloud, one of the challenges as an early adopter is you have to fight through some of these things and help things mature. So when you look at the marketplace today, what advice would you give to your peers? What can they do better faster than they could before? Or what do you wish you could have, if you had had, when you had started, that you could have taken advantage of? I almost wish what did somebody have told you that you didn't stumble on that? Sure, I think that we didn't have this as a stumbling block by talking to my peers, so I feel that their stumbling block a lot of time is the corporate support and the monetary side of it. That you need to make an investment in these technologies in order for you to gain out of them. So we have IR&D budgets and we bring in brand new technologies like VMAX and deduplication and all those different things as they're coming online and we already have Hadoop in our labs, we're looking at Neo4j. So as time goes on, we're pushing the envelope and that's what I recommend to everybody, is push the envelope, see what's coming, see what people are talking about, what's the hot topics and stay on top of it and try your best and sometimes budgets get in the way and maybe you can use a smaller section of your environment to do it, but that way you have some type of knowledge that when you're talking to your customers, you really understand their problems and then in turn you can bring in a brand new technology solution that nobody else has thought and really innovate. All right, hey, Tom, I really appreciate you sharing. Your embrace of the new technologies are out there. I'm sure all the practitioners out there are going to learn a lot from what you have to say and thanks for sharing the story of Calibur. We will be right back with our next guest in our broad coverage from EMC World.